That Noise Behind You? A Rival in the Stacks

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines 150 Campuses Win Recognition in Survey of Great Colleges to Work For More than 300 four-year and two-year colleges signed up for the second annual survey by The Chronicle, and 39 were named to a new Honor Roll for their workplace policies. New Top Republican on House Panel: Washington Doesn't Always Know Best They Thought Globally, but Now Colleges Push Online Programs Locally Jill Biden Shines Global Spotlight on U.S. Community Colleges A Town Rich in Colleges and Cows Gains a Crown College Towns as Baby Names? A Few May Resist Trendiness Commentary Kevin Carey: Stanford U., Duke U., Rice U., ... and Gates U.?

By THOMAS BARTLETT

It's the stuff of scholarly nightmares.

You spend years working on a book, toiling in archives, poring over sources, examining and re-examining data, only to discover that you're not alone. Someone else is working on more or less the same book.

It happened to Elisabeth Gitter. Ms. Gitter, a professor of English at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, spent roughly a decade researching her book on Laura Bridgman. Bridgman was the most-famous deaf-blind girl in the United States pre-Helen Keller, but had been largely lost to history.

Ms. Gitter was going to single-handedly rescue Bridgman from obscurity. That was the plan, anyway. Then she got a phone call from her editor. Turns out, another scholar had also spent years working on a Bridgman book and, worse, that book was scheduled to come out at the same time as hers. "I was knocked off my feet," Ms. Gitter remembers.

The professor — perhaps naïvely, she says now — considered Bridgman her possession, and the idea that someone else was writing about her made Ms. Gitter feel like she'd been robbed. It was months before she recovered.

The other author, Ernest Freeberg, an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, was also initially distressed. "You think you're working on something that's going to be a big surprise to everyone," he says. "But it turns out to be a big surprise to everyone but one."

Robert T. Wood was writing about a movement, not a person. The focus of his research was a punk-rock subgenre called Straight Edge. While the testosterone-fueled, guitar-driven music sounds like punk, Straight Edgers reject the sex-and-drugs lifestyle of their spiky-haired counterparts.

Straight Edge had been the focus of a few academic papers, but it had not received book-length treatment. Mr. Wood assumed, not unreasonably, that his would be the first.

He was wrong. Another book on Straight Edge, by Ross Haenfler, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi, beat his by a few weeks. Neither scholar knew the other was working on a book.

"I was like, 'Oh, crap,'" says Mr. Wood, an associate professor of sociology at the University ofLethbridge, in Alberta. "I thought my book was going to be turning the first shovelful of dirt, and it turned out to be the second."

Rhonda K. Garelick did research for her book on Loie Fuller, a modern-dance pioneer, for eight years. In another case of cruel timing, a different Loie Fuller book was published just a month after hers hit the stands.

Ms. Garelick wasn't surprised, though: She had known that someone else was on the Loie Fuller trail. During visits to a library in Paris, the archivist would tell her that another American had been there asking for the same material. "And I would say 'Who? Who?' and they wouldn't know," says Ms. Garelick, a professor of English and the performing arts at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

The mysterious American was Ann Cooper Albright. She, in turn, was so upset when she heard that Ms. Garelick was writing a book about Loie Fuller that she considered abandoning her own project. "I remember saying, 'Maybe I shouldn't write this book,'" says Ms. Albright, a professor of dance and theater at Oberlin College. But a colleague encouraged her to soldier on, and she's glad she did.

Other scholars have been less flustered to encounter competition, or at least better at hiding their feelings. Mark Silver's book Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature, 1868-1937 (University of Hawaii Press) was published this year. Sari Kawana's book Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture (University of Minnesota Press) was also published this year.

But, according to Mr. Silver, there is enough room in the world for two books on Japanese detective fiction. In fact, he's glad to have the company. "It validates your own sense that you're working on something that is interesting and valuable," says Mr. Silver, a visiting assistant professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College.

Ms. Kawana, an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, is similarly generous. "Rather than seeing these other people as competitors, you should cooperate with them," she says. "Ideally, you should work together to make the topic popular."

David Shearer agrees — in theory. Mr. Shearer, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, has been doing research for a book on civil policing in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. So has Paul Hagenloh, an associate professor of history at Syracuse University. Both started work on their projects in the mid-1990s and both will see their books published next year.

Much of the material, and even some of the conclusions, are sure to overlap, according to Mr. Shearer. In the beginning, the two cooperated with each other, sharing sources and discussing their research. But a couple of years ago, they both decided it would be best to cut off that communication, for the sake of the books.

Mr. Shearer says he's looking forward to reading Mr. Hagenloh's work, but he does harbor a trace of apprehension. "Of course," he says, "anyone would want to be the only person writing about a topic."

There can be upsides to dueling books. It's easier to catch the attention of book reviewers, for one thing, which can help goose sales. Though often those reviewers prefer one book over the other.

The shock of discovering you're not alone wears off eventually, says Mr. Freeberg, author of one of the Laura Bridgman books.

The paranoia, however, tends to linger.

Recently Mr. Freeberg has been working on a book about Eugene V. Debs, the socialist and union leader. In the archives one day, he couldn't help asking if anyone else had requested the same files. Just, you know, out of curiosity.